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“Excellent. I need to call home. It’ll be a little after six in the morning, there, but there’ll be somebody on the working group desk. You should call your father and find out what’s been happening in Taos…”
16
Lucas watched Letty get in the helicopter and kept watching until the chopper disappeared behind a mountain.
“She’ll be all right,” Rae said. “She’s enjoying herself. Though she wouldn’t admit it.”
“That Brit has his eye on her,” Lucas said.
Rae laughed: “You think? And maybe something other than his eye?”
“I’ll worry about it later. We should get down to Taos, talk to the cops—and maybe call Greet on the way,” Lucas said. “We need more of your SOG guys up here. Not so much the hunters, more the kicking-in-the-door guys.”
“Greet’s got them cranked up and ready to go—we need to say the word.”
“We can say the word on the way. Which SUV is least shot-up? We’ll give the other one to the Detrick team.”
—
They made surethe Detrick team had a fix on the four locations they knew about at the ski village—the RV, Turney’s body on the mountainside, Catton’s house, and possibly a body in a grave up the hill from Catton’s back door, with a red stone on it—and had a plan to work them.
They gave Underwood Greet’s direct number, and told him to stay in touch with her, so that everybody knew what was going on. They transferred Rae’s gear bag and all the luggage to the SUV Letty had been driving, but before they left, Underwood said, “Ah, Lucas. Give me a minute.”
They walked off to the side away from the others and Underwood said, “I get the impression you’re directing the law enforcement traffic here.”
“Me and Rae,” Lucas said.
“My people back at Detrick are scared to death,” Underwood said. “They’ve been looking at what Scott was doing there, the details of his work. They believe that he could very well have created this hybrid virus—that’s after Packer turned in a full report on the lab in Los Alamos. They haven’t been able to test the hybrid virus yet, but given what Packer is pulling out of the lab, the equipment and so on, they think he completed his experiments.”
He continued: “And from what we’ve seen in Catton’s house and the bus…and with Alec’s interviews in the bus…”
“He’s got it,” Lucas said. “The hybrid virus.”
“Yes. I’ve got an MD, but I’ve never practiced—I veered over into research—but I’ve talked to a lot of field people, doctors, who’ve dealt with Marburg and Ebola, treating it, and they say it’s the worst,”Underwood said. “The very worst. All us Detrick guys can do is research it—but you law enforcement people have to stop it. You have to kill these people, Lucas. You have to make sure the virus doesn’t get loose. If it gets loose, it’ll be worse than any world war we’ve ever had. You gotta stop it, man.”
Rae shouted, “Let’s go!”
“We’ll give it our best shot,” Lucas told Underwood, as he took a step toward the SUV.
Underwood hooked Lucas’s arm, stopped him. “ ‘Best shot’ might not be good enough,” Underwood said, holding on. “You have to doanythingto stop it. Anything! Anything! I’m looking around and I’m not seeing enough cops, enough planning, enough fear. It’s like this is just another problem, but it’s not.”
“Well…”
Underwood jabbed Lucas in the chest, hard. His eyes were hard, like black marbles: “Do you have kids?”
“Sure, four, including Letty.”
“If this gets loose, go home and wrap your arms around them, because some of them, maybe all of them, are gonna die,” Underwood said. “They’re gonna die right in front of you, begging for help and there won’t be a fuckin’ thing you can do about it.”
“I…”
“Lucas: this is it! This is it!”
Lucas shook him off, took another step back: “I got it.”
“I hope so. Because you guys are about the only thing standing between us and a calamity.”
Lucas nodded. “I gotta get going.”
